Reading for the Retro Hugos: Short Stories

I’ve already done posts about the novellas and novelettes I read in looking for potential nominations for the 1943 Retro Hugos. Now, it’t time for the short stories.

Leigh Brackett was a master of the planetary romance, stories about strange beings and ancient civilisations on other planets, and the adventurers, some heroic, some cynical and world-weary, who explored them. In the short story “Child of the Sun,” her hero, Eric Falken, a rebel fighting for the survival of free men against a tyrant who enforces Happiness on humanity and rules a docile populace, discovers a hidden planet inside the orbit of Mercury, and a vastly ancient energy being who wants amusement - human toys to play with. Falken must outwit the creature to gain the planet as a hiding place for the rebels.

“Child of the Green Light” is another of Leigh Brackett’s short stories, this one about Son, the only survivor of a space ship crew trapped by a mysterious green light, which is the manifestation of a part of another universe penetrating our own. Under the influence of this light, he has changed, his atoms altering frequency. Eventually, he will be able to cross over to the other universe, where a woman is waiting for him. But then another ship of humans arrives, and he learns that the light is affecting all life in the solar system, slowly killing the human race, and he must choose between the woman he loves or the survival of a human civilisation he barely remembers.

Lester del Rey’s “The Wings of Night” is a haunting and emotionally powerful story about the last member of a once advanced civilisation living in a refuge created when the moon began to lose its atmosphere. As the soil is depleted over time of an element necessary for reproduction, it seems inevitable that Lhin, the last of his species, will die alone. Until a distressed space freighter carrying two humans makes an emergency landing on the uninhabited moon and, by accident, triggers the landing doors to Lhin’s underground world. The story examines - and condemns - issues of prejudice, colonialism, exploitation and slavery, and ends with hope for both Lhin and the hearts of men.

It may be pushing the boundaries somewhat, but Jorge Luis Borges’ short story “Funes, His Memory” - also known as “Funes the Memorious” - is certainly a tale of the fantastic, a story about a boy named Funes who suffers an accident which leaves him crippled, but with a memory so intense, detailed and complete that he amuses himself by inventing a number system in which every number up to 70,000 has its own name. Borges turns the simple recollections of a man who met Funes a few times into a meditation on the varieties and purposes of memory and forgetting.

Heinlein’s short story “Pied Piper” is a slight piece of work but nonetheless entertaining. There’s a war, and as always, one side is losing. The leaders of the losing side turn to their greatest scientist for a weapon to help them win the war. Instead, he proposes a way to end the war, forever.

Isaac Asimov’s “Robot AL-76 Goes Astray” is one if the Robotics Corporation stories, this time about a robot programmed for construction work on the moon that somehow ends up in rural Virginia, where a general purpose repairman finds him and tries to make a few quick bucks off his discovery. It’s a comedic story, light in tone and mostly just for fun.

Malcolm Jameson, writing as Colin Keith, produced a charming little capitalist comedy called “If You’re So Smart—“ about a scientist frustrated by a greedy robber baron who controls pretty much every major business on Titan and is trying to close down his research so he can a quire it cheaply. Determined to resist, the scientist figures out how to use his new machine to take over all the industrialists holdings, destabilising the solar system economy in the process. Humorous and well-written.

Jameson’s “The Goddess’ Legacy” is a rather different work. Set in Nazi-occupied Greece, the story’s narrator, an American businessman, encounters a remnant of the cult of Pallas Athene, and is witness to her continued legacy of protection for her city and people.

L. Ron Hubbard’s Strain is a truly gut-wrenching story about what a person will endure in war for the sake of his country, his fellows, his mission, but it’s the ironic turn at the end that turns the whole thing inside out and makes you think about the ethos and the military culture. Psychologically adept, well-written, painfully graphic treatment of a difficult subject.

The Embassy, written by Donald Wohlheim under the pen name Martin Pearson, is a twisty little story about what might happen if someone decided that Martians had set up an observing mission somewhere in New York City, and hired some not too imaginative private eyes to track it down.

And, from a writer I don’t remember hearing about at all, F. Anton Reeds, with a bittersweet story called “Forever Is Not So Long,” about an English scientist in 1931 working on time travel. He decides to run the first trial, to travel forward a decade - and learns things that change his priorities fir the rest of his life.

“Deadlock,” by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore, writing under the name Lewis Padgett, is an interesting variant on the mad robot story. The Company has been working on developing robots for some time. The ultimate goal - an intelligent, indestructible robot capable of solving any problem. The problem they keep running into is that the robots keep going mad, and being indestructible, end up being encased in tombs of concrete. Finally, they develop a robot who remains sane - but as it turns out, that’s even worse.

Moore and Kuttner - writing again as Lewis Padgett - produced another robot story in 1942, “The Twonky,” a very unsettling story about a temporarily temporally displaced mechanical technician from the future who, while suffering from amnesia, spends an afternoon working in a radio factory until he recovers, realises his situation and goes back to wherever he came from. He’s not otherwise important to the story. The problem is, that where he comes from, he makes Twonkies - robots programmed not only to do household tasks, but to censor the cultural exposures, and manipulate the impulses of their “owners” - removing individuality, creativity, initiative, and terminating those who persist in their wayward ways. The story leaves the reader hanging, having shown us what Twonkies can do, with a Twonky loose in the 20th century and waiting for the next unsuspecting customer. Sf horror at its finest.

“Later Than You Think,” written under Kuttner’s name alone, is one of those stories about a person who, in some fashion, finds a way to learn tomorrow’s news today. In this story, it’s a sales clerk in a record store whose hobby is tinkering with radio equipment, who accidentally builds a radio that plays tomorrow’s news. Unfortunately, he and his radio fall into the hands of a gangster, who forces him to use it to make money for the gangster by various nefarious means. All ends well, however, and the boy gets the girl and finds a way to use his radio without causing too much mayhem.

Kuttner’s “False Dawn” is an interesting tale of unintended consequences. An egotistic and immoral scientist has developed a process that regresses life forms through the stages of evolution, and decides to use his discovery to get rid of his financial backer by regressing him to amoeba status. The plan backfires when it turns out that human evolution has a rather longer history than anyone realised. Kuttner builds some nice ironic turns into the story.

Writing under the name Kelvin Kent, Henry Kuttner penned a series of light-hearted time travel adventures featuring a roguish chap named Pete Manx. “Dames is Poison” sees Manx in renaissance Milan, getting mixed up with Cesare and Lucretia Borgia.

“Kilgallen’s Lunar Legacy” by Norman L. Knight is a Bunyanesque story about an Irishman, his will, a dozen replicas in spaceborne coffins and a buried legacy of unique proportions. Tongue in cheek humour.

Fredric Brown’s “Etaoin Shrdlu” is an updated version of the sorcerer’s apprentice - this time the enchanted machine is a sentient linotype machine that can set anything in a fraction of the tine that the process normally takes, and that demands to be kept working. The solution - teach it Buddhism, so that instead of running its operator ragged, it meditates and achieves nirvana. Yes, it’s Orientalist as fuck.

In “The Shoes”, Robert Bloch plays with the old idea of bargaining with the devil for eternal life. Everyone who tries it thinks he can outwit Satan, and the little man who calls himself Dr. Faust is no exception. But everyone leaves out something that trips him up in the end, and here too, Dr. Faust is no exception.

Fritz Leiber’s “The Sunken Land” is a Fafhrd and Grey Mouser story, which means classic sword and sorcery adventure. This time the two soldiers of fortune are out fishing when Fafhrd finds a relic of a long lost sunken country in one of the fish as he cleans it. The relic leads to a dreamlike experience for Fafhrd as he seems to relive a voyage of his ancestors to the doomed island before it sank.

Jane Rice’s “Idol of the Flies” is a disquieting portrait of Pruitt, a child without empathy or conscience, the sort of child we now understand to have a profound psychological disorder. A child of some wealth and privilege, he hates the people around him, using his position to torment, ridicule and abuse the servants in the household. And he tortures small creatures. Pruitt has a particular fascination for flies. Indeed, he has created a ritual in which he commands the help of a supernatural being he calls the Idol of the Flies in his schemes to harm others. It’s unfortunate - for him, at any rate - that Pruitt doesn’t know all the names of the Lord of the Flies, nor his true nature, until much too late.

Hannes Bok is primarily known as an illustrator, but he also produced some speculative fiction. In “Letter to an Invisible Woman” Bok’s protagonist addresses a woman he has fallen in love with, a woman who has a secret that makes her different, who has abandoned him because he has discovered it. He pleads with her to return, but the story does not give us her answer. Or perhaps, it does.

Ronald Takaki: Strangers from a Different Shore

Ronald Takaki's Strangers from a Different Shore is a history of Asian-Americans. I wish I could find something similar that deals with the history of Asian communities in Canada, because one thing I do know is that while some of the patterns of immigration and exclusion are the same - from the early use of East Asians as a cheap, expendable labour force, to the incarceration of Japanese immigrants in interment camps, and much that happened in-between - the shared Commonwealth membership of Canada and some Asian nations made for different immigration patterns, and the overall proportion of people of Asian background in the general population is greater in Canada than in the US (around 12 percent, compared to around six percent).

But there are many books I want to read about Canada that haven't been written, or if they have been, aren't accessible. Back to Ronald Takaki's study of Asian-Americans.

Takaki begins by noting that Asian-Americans have been left out of the popular concept of what it means to be American. For many people, "American" means white; it may be accompanied by "African-American", but rarely does it encompass the notion of "Asian-American." Nor does the popular immigration narrative of Asians in American match that of the European immigrant - the first sight of Lady Liberty, the arrival at Ellis Island. As Takaki stresses, Asian Americans are strangers from a different shore - the countries of the Pacific Rim and South Asia - but they also arrived at a different shore - some in Hawaii, some the West coast. And unlike many European arrivals who assimilated, often within a generation, Asian Americans remain in some ways strangers in the land they have been born in.

Takaki's project is a large and complicated one - looking at the immigration of so many diverse groups - Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Filipino, Indian, and others - across American history. But even among the differences, some threads connect the experiences of most groups.

The early history of Asian immigrants in Hawaii and the Western states is one of being seen as the answer to a growing demand for cheap labour. Not only could Asian workers be employed in agricultural and other areas where many whites would not work, they could be paid far less than white labourers. White farm owners and other large-scale employers used Asian immigrants to discourage union organising among white workers, and hired Asian workers (along with Mexican and Puerto Rican workers) from different nations to discourage solidarity: "...the California Department of Industrial Relations reported that growers preferred to employ 'a mixture of laborers of various races, speaking diverse languages, and not accustomed to mingling with each other. The practice [was] intended to avoid labor trouble which might result from having a homogeneous group of laborers of the same race or nationality. Laborers speaking different languages [were] not as likely to arrive at a mutual understanding which would lead to strikes.' "

White landowners often used the ethnic diversity of the agricultural labour force to manipulate workers. They would pit Japanese crews against Korean or Chinese crews, playing on traditional animosities to encourage competition in worker output. They would hire Mexican workers as strikebreakers when Filipino workers tried to negotiate better pay.

Takaki continues: "...coming from 'a different shore,' Asian immigrants constituted a unique laboring army of 'strangers,' to use Georg Simmel’s term: of alien origin, they were brought here to serve as an 'internal colony' - nonwhites allowed to enter as 'cheap' migratory laborers and members of a racially subordinated group, not future citizens of American society."

Another common thread that surfaced with almost every new wave of immigration from Asia was the issue of interracial relationships. Immigration laws often separated families or favoured single men as immigrants. In some cases, the ratios of men to women immigrating was as high as ten to one. Men alone, without their wives or without any chance if finding wives from their own backgrounds, frequented brothels and sex workers. And some formed long-term relationships with white women, even though in many states, interracial marriages were against the law. Fear of Asian men as sexual predators surfaced at regular intervals; like blacks in America, Asian immigrants were often portrayed as dangerous to the safety of white women and the purity of the national bloodlines.

Changing immigration laws over time made it sometimes possible for entire families to come to America, at other times, only men were allowed, specifically as labourers. Sometimes they were able to gain citizenship and bring wives and children to join them, at other times the path to citizenship was difficult, and even citizens could not sponsor non-citizens. In some cases, Asian immigrants who had at ine time been able to acquire citizenship, such as immigrants from Indus, had their citizenship taken away when exclusion laws were extended to include them. The laws changed based on the economic needs and racial prejudices of white America, and patterns of immigration among Asians of different nationalities changed with the laws.

The early stories of different waves of Asian immigrants are fairly similar - most came to America to find economic success, hoping to either return home as wealthy men, or to bring their families to join them in a land of prosperity. While some did achieve one of these goals, for many, the dream was never realised. They faced discrimination, back-breaking work for low wages. They were seen as an expendable labour force, but not as prospective citizens. They build the railways, planted and harvested the food, worked in service industries across the country, but were never accepted as ‘real Americans.’ And then things changed with the involvement of the US in WWII, which had very different meanings and consequences for different groups of Asian Americans.

For Filipinos in America, the war in the Pacific was a direct threat to the families they had left behind. Many enlisted and fought with white soldiers against Imperial Japan, and many hoped that fighting for American interests would result in them being seen, finally, as Americans.

For Koreans, the war rekindled hope for Korean independence in the aftermath of a possible destruction of Imperial Japanese military power. Although the US government viewed Koreans as Japanese subjects and classed them as “enemy aliens,” many became involved in the war effort as best they could, joining the National Guard and serving as translators.

Indian and Chinese immigrants benefitted from wartime alliances. Allied strategy called for an accommodation with India as a potential block against Imperial Japan’s plans in southeast Asia, while China allied with the US and declared war on Japan. Chinese communities in America contributed extensively to the war effort and enlistment was high among Chinese men. By the end of the war, the Exclusion Act had been repealed, opening doors for immigrants from both countries.

Japanese Americans living in the western states were confined in internment camps as potential enemy combatants, their property confiscated. In Hawaii, where Japanese had been integrated into the mainstream community, and where large proportions of key tradespeople necessary to the war effort were Japanese, wide-scale internment did not take place. Despite the internments, 33,000 Japanese Americans served in the US military during the war.

In the postwar era, many veterans in all these groups used their status to become citizens and to finally bring their families to the United States. Despite the lowering of immigration bans against Chinese, Indian and Filipino immigrants, quotas were set at very low levels which remained until the 1960s, when race-based immigration policies were (technically) ended and all Asian nations assigned quotas in line with those for European countries. This resulted in yet more shifts in the patterns of immigration, and changes in the class and educational levels of those immigrants, although it did not necessarily make it easier for Asian immigrants to find jobs and social acceptance once they arrived. While many immigrants from Asian countries now arrive in the US with advanced degrees, business capital, or both, others are refugees from wars, poverty and environmental disasters and arrive with almost nothing.

In telling the story of Asians coming to, and living and working in, America, Takaki alternates between a remote and academic historical narrative of facts and events and legislation, and a more #ownvoice narrative that relies heavily on letters, journals, interviews, songs and poems to convey the experiences from the perspectives of the immigrants themselves, which he explores and expands on. In these sections, he closes the distance even further by including, where appropriate, details from the experiences of his own family.

In this well researched and well organised study, Takaki covers much ground, from the experiences of early Chinese laborers to refugees from Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia in the post Vietnam war era. Written in 1989 and revised in 1998, the more recent stories of Asian peoples in America are missing, but as a historical survey, it is an excellent resource for anyone seeking to understand issues of diversity in the US. Takaki concludes his work with this summation:

“...throughout history, Asian Americans have been transforming America and also finding themselves being transformed by America. Since the arrival of the first Chinese during the 1849 gold rush, the interaction between Asian Americans and the larger society has been dynamic and dialectical. Exploited as agricultural and industrial workers, they fought for justice through labor unions and strikes. Victims of the “white”-only provision of 1790 Naturalization Law, they organized campaigns that culminated in its nullification in 1952 — a victory that made political membership more inclusive and the Statue of Liberty a more democratic symbol. Forced into segregated Chinatowns and internment camps, Asian Americans joined the U.S. military during World War II and fought as “one people” against fascism abroad and for equality at home. Excluded by racist immigration laws like the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and the 1924 National Origins Act, they helped end this discrimination with the 1965 Immigration Act. Denied their cultures in a Eurocentric society, Asian Americans sought to preserve their heritages by creating communities like Chinatowns as well as Nihonmachis (Japantowns), organizing festivals, and founding language schools as well as churches and temples. Rendered invisible in mainstream history textbooks and courses, they established their own historical societies and museums and also organized exhibits for the Smithsonian Institution. And through a student activism that emerged in the sixties and resurged in the nineties, they innovated new curriculums in Asian-American studies at universities across America — from Berkeley and UCLA to Minnesota and Michigan to Cornell, Columbia, and Princeton.

These struggles of Asian Americans have been a continuous rebellion against the exclusive constructions of “we, the people” and a constant resolve to help make this “a more perfect union,” an ethnically diverse yet united society. The recovering and sharing of their stories can help all Americans understand why these immigrants who went east to America should have been viewed and treated not as “strangers,” but as Americans “from a different shore.” The history of Asian Americans offers all of us an opportunity to carry into the coming century a larger memory of America’s past.”